bcc4

Sometime back in early 2010 I alongwith Arvind, Narain and Ram were discussing on a city based community initiative to identify accident hotspots on ECR and curb traffic regulation. What evolved was a presentation of the possibilities to an audience at Ideacamp.

This caught the attention of Sanobar, a RJ by profession and then a newbie to TKF events. She put us on a Chat with the ACP Traffic Ms Sonel Mishra and me and Ram started the initiative of Capacity building CCTP (Chennai City Traffic Police) on Social Media.

The engagement involved creating awareness of the power of Social media to the Stakeholder group and discussing strategies of the rollout with the team. We powered the entire team on Facebook and twitter and primed for an official Launch on August 15, 2010 . Then we had to face the challenges of end user resistance to technology adoption and thereby a protracted delay in the rollout.

On one end both me and Ram had aggressively campaigned about this online and the media was eager to see this take off. Slowly we started facing queries from the community on credibility of the group and all such outburst. We interfered once to post on the search on Tamanna . Other than that we maintained the integrity of the site all along. Slowly the Knowledge Transfer happened in the month of May 2011 and today the wall is buzz with activity .

Today the Chennai City Traffic Police Facebook wall is nearing 8000 users online and daily action taken reports happening. We have transferred all knowledge artifacts to the Government and I take this opportunity to acknowledge the efforts of Ram and rest of the Team at The Knowledge Foundation on a job well done ! Thanx Team and we have made a difference !

Reserve your weekend to spend some time with Geeks to catch up with Technology, Trends and Code ! Barcamp Chennai is back ! The event is to be held at Cognizant , Okkiyam , Karapakkam, Chennai. If you are a geek or a technology enthusiast who would love to keep update on technology go register yourself at http://barcampchennai.org/bcc4/

What’s Barcamp ?

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants. It’s about love and geekery and having a focal point for great ideas. It’s a typical unconference . A little history of Barcamp is that ….Barcamp made its presence in India by 2006 with the first event at Delhi. Barcamp Chennai was the second one to be held. This was followed by Barcamp Bangalore and other cities. Barcamp Chennai was held in Feb 11, 12 2006 . Since then we have come a long way having conducted 3 editions. This edition will have discussion on topics like “10 features to look for while buying a DSLR ” , ” How can you contribute to wikipedia “, ” Study on Accident hotspots by Ms Sonal Misra IPS” , “How to power an online shopping site in 2 hours” so on .

The event will be free to attend or very close to free. But there’s a catch! Participants are expected to contribute back to the conference by participating actively. “Active participation” might mean giving a presentation on any chosen topic, helping with a presentation, blogging or podcasting the event, or whatever other creative ways to contribute people can come up with. Some view Barcamp as an opportunity for great minds to come together to discuss on the latest issues and solutions available for them. The current edition of the event is sponsored by Cognizant. Cognizant had also been a serious patron on previous editions of Barcamp Chennai (Barcamp Chennai 2)

Incidentally the presentation that i had made at Ideacamp was further pursued as a theme of a program by leading FM Radio Channel ” Chennai Live ” last week wherein we had participation of Ms Sonal Mishra , Commissioner of Police (Traffic) . She is coming in for barcamp to express her willingness to lead and help us in this project . Once we are able to do this we can replicate the model for the entire Chennai city.